The nature of farming is that it comes with many unknowns: weather, pests, competition from abroad, effectiveness of new machinery. Why does the labor pool need to be another one?

Empty stations on the harvest lines are more common this year throughout a swath of Arizona farm country. The reasons are many: a 40,000-person limit on the number of foreign guest workers allowed into the US, tighter borders that are discouraging illegal crossings, and rising demand for day laborers in other industries, such as higher-paying construction work.

Because this 41,000-acre patch of the Southwest produces 95 percent of the nation’s home-grown winter lettuce and 90 percent of its winter vegetables, its labor issues have ramifications far beyond these leafy fields.

Read (Christian Science Monitor)